Novelists often make subtler political scientists than do the political scientists themselves, perhaps because a competent novelist nourishes himself on his observation of human actuality whereas the political scientist is typically the subscriber to some party-orthodoxy or the proponent of someone’s special-interest agenda. The names of Joseph Conrad and Fyodor Dostoyevsky come to mind, as men of keen political perception. Competent novelists are anthropologists, interested supremely in reporting human facts as they see them and in making their way to essential structures of communal existence and the cultural tradition. The tenured political-science professors strive mightily to avoid those cases where facts contradict doctrine, while the genuine novelists relish both the paradox of human nature and the tragicomic accent of the historical chronicle.

The normalization of life in the Swat Valley, where the inhabitants are returning to their homes after fleeing the military confrontation between the Taliban and the Pakistani Army, is a happy development. The Taliban have lost their hold on the Swat Valley, where they had managed to carve out an ultra-Islamic republic inside and with the approval of the Islamic republic of Pakistan. Does this prove militant Islam is now on the decline?

George Handlery about the week that was. Struggling against the racist profiling of dogs. Culture and crime. Enshrining the wrong tradition. Bailouts and pork. Taxing what is not understood. Talking about the weather is not idle talk any more. New terms for the old left. Helping the people against its will.
 
1. Here is good story if told as a joke. At the same time, it indicates a serious ailment. The increasingly popular four-legged assault weapons, such as pit bulls and Rottweilers, have produced – mainly to children – deaths and serious injuries here. As a result, an attempt was made to have dangerous races prohibited or to subject their ownership to controls. Instantly someone discovered that dog rights were about to be violated. The attack dogs were being proscribed because of their RACE. While only few victims on record have been torn apart by Chihuahuas or maimed by poodles, it was decided that a law restricting the ownership of canines declared to belong to dangerous races is unfair.

These are not happy days for Americans, particularly if raised on traditional American values of Northern European provenance. Conscientious work as redemptive virtue, thrift, self-reliance, self-restraint, Biblical ethical principles, modesty, high-minded civic culture, love of liberty, distrust of centralized power,

America’s ruling elite – once the embodiment of such values and now a putrid trench running from Wall Street to Madison Avenue to Washington DC to Hollywood -- has debauched and upended them as thoroughly as though it has been teleported directly from 3^rd century Rome. It has deployed the full arsenal of Roman degeneration: unsustainable spending, shaving the coins of the realm, excessive taxation, disincentives to work and saving, wanton waste, corruption on an enormous scale, opulent narcissism at the top, lax borders, importing foreign populations, degrading the value of citizenship, promotion of sexual deviations and excesses, undermining the family unit, trampling on traditions, inuring the populace to “free” handouts and soul-corroding entertainment.  

If the U.S. trade deficit were to disappear, do you think that would be a good or bad thing?

For years, many in the media and the political world wailed about the U.S. trade deficit, but it is rapidly disappearing -- and the consequences are going to be disastrous.

"There is thus strong ground for the assertion of Mr. Griffis, that many Americans who boast of their “unmixed English stock” are descended from Dutch or Flemish ancestors who first saw England in the Duke of Alva’s time. One hardly sees how it could be otherwise. In the days of Charles I. a considerable part of the rank and file of Puritans were children and grandchildren of Netherlanders, and of these surely many must have been included among the 20,000 who came to New England between 1629 and 1640."

-- John Fiske, The Dutch and Quaker Colonies in Americap.53
 

Last week, the government of Belgium, a small European country of 10 million inhabitants, decided to grant official papers to illegal aliens who can demonstrate that they have “sufficiently integrated” into the country. The illegal immigrants must fulfill a number of conditions, such as having lived in the country for the past five years or having worked in Belgium for at least two-and-a-half years, having learned one of Belgium’s three official languages or having children at school.

George Handlery about the week that was. No to violence but support for its ideas. The dictatorship of virtue is a perennial seller. Good coup, bad coup, whose coup is what matters? Faith, identity and tolerance. Another failing EU candidate. Is Obama Wilsonian? The Dictator’s Tantrum.
 
1. Not only ignoring its reasons but in defiance of the causes, the Honduran coup is regretted by the moralizing media. Coups are “not good”. However, in this unusual case, it prevented an abuse. The action removed a ruler who, exploiting the state power entrusted to him, mounted an incremental take over in slow motion. Comparable cases (Stauffenberg, July 20, 1944) are celebrated as heroic stands against tyranny. In reality, some regret only that the wrong side has been hit. A major paper finds that it is a positive sign that a putsch has provoked an international reaction. The question is: would the double continent’s left of center governments and their global community of fans have been so consequently true to principle had the dismissed plotter been a rightist and the conspirators men of the left?

My recent Brussels Journal “exhumation” of Robert B. Edgerton’s remarkable study of Sick Societies (1992) provoked a variety of responses, with a good many veering from Edgerton’s main topic (also mine) of “maladaptation” into discussions of colonialism and the relation of the West to the so-called Third World. The sliding from one topic to another is itself of interest, but I should first like to address a number of reader-comments that focus directly on the “maladaptation” thesis.

The trial of Youssouf Fofana, the black Muslim murderer of Ilan Halimi, along with the verdict and the sentencing, has been one of the major topics at the websites. When I first began GalliaWatch in February 2006, the biggest story of the day was the incredible cruelty with which Ilan Halimi, a young Jewish boy, had been tortured and killed. The story made headlines around the world, and the Jewish communities demanded justice. They saw it, justifiably, as an act of anti-Semitism. But it is more than that: it is a grim reminder of what the presence of Islam in France can mean at its most sadistic. Unfortunately, many high-profile leftist Jewish "intellectuals" refuse to admit this, since to do so would be to admit that immigration is bad for France, and being committed immigrationists, they cannot do the right thing and call for an end to immigration. Yet this is a case that cries out for justice, not only for Ilan but for France.